The rooms of the Appartamento dei Principi in Palazzo Reale in Milan are hosting - from 19 November 2022 to 8 January 2023 - the exhibition Maria Mulas. Milan, portraits of the late 1900s, promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture produced and organized by Palazzo Reale and the Maria Mulas Archive, curated by Andrea Tomasetig.

Maria Mulas showed like no other the face of the Milanese, Italian and international artistic and cultural world.

Milan in those years was establishing itself as the capital of design, fashion, publishing, and more. It is the place around which revolves a universe of native or adopted talents, who have come from all over Italy and the world.

Maria, who arrived in her early twenties in 1956 from her native Manerba del Garda in the wake of her brother, portrays them in the right places and at the right moments and returns them to us with unparalleled freshness and intensity, a worthy heir of her older brother Ugo who died prematurely in 1973. The seventies, eighties and nineties are for her a whirlwind of meetings, Venetian and Kassel Biennials, preparations and inaugurations of exhibitions, literary presentations, parties and reportages around the world. But the privileged place of observation is always Milan which, like a magnet, welcomes and integrates the various regional and foreign origins, and in those years was an extraordinary laboratory of creativity and modernity which it then retransmitted in Italy and in the world.

There are hundreds and hundreds of people who have been portrayed by her: artists, gallery owners, critics, designers, architects, writers, editors, journalists, stylists, directors, actors, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, friends. A detailed list shows 539, from Claudio Abbado's "A" to Franco Zeffirelli's "Z". On display are a hundred of her photographic portraits, which came from a long exhibition at the Slovak National Museum promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Bratislava and the result of a selection that documents the photographer's close relationship with Milan and its protagonists in the thirty years that concludes the twentieth century.

It is no wonder that the Municipality dedicated a major exhibition to her in 1998, again at Palazzo Reale, consecrating her as the "eye of Milan", and that today they once again celebrate her as the photographer who - although secluded from the circuit of galleries and the market of art - he captured the deep, true soul of Milan, which is a city not posed, but dynamic, at work, the city of the arts and professions and of the most advanced entrepreneurship.

To facilitate the visitor's journey, the exhibition is divided into six sections: Architecture and Design; Art; Literature and Publishing; Fashion; Performing arts; Cosmopolitan Milan and Mary in the world.

From the formidable archive of Maria Mulas emerges a highly representative sequence of personalities who embody much of Italian culture and Made in Italy. Some names: Giorgio Armani, Gae Aulenti, Joseph Beuys, Giorgio Bocca, Roberto Calasso, Gillo Dorfles, Umberto Eco, Inge Feltrinelli, Dario Fo, Carla Fracci, Allen Ginsberg, Krizia, Vico Magistretti, Enzo Mari, Marcello Mastroianni, Ottavio Missoni, Bruno Munari, Fernanda Pivano, Gio Ponti, Miuccia Prada, Ettore Sottsass, Giorgio Strehler, Ornella Vanoni, Lea Vergine, Luigi Veronesi, Gianni Versace, Andy Warhol.

But the exhibition is not just an enjoyable gallery of interesting portraits of a good photographer. It's so much more. At the end of the journey, one realizes that the portrait that predominates above all is that of Milan, the true protagonist of an unrepeatable season.

The exhibition project is signed by Leo Guerra and Giovanni Renzi , who have skilfully brought the sumptuous furnished rooms into relation with the photographs on display, also using the Toio series by Achille Castiglioni produced by Flos for the design of the light.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by the publisher Umberto Allemandi , with writings by Andrea Tomasetig, Paolo Fallai, Stefano Salis and Patrizia Zappa Mulas.

Entrance to the exhibition is free.